Many of the social contract theorists working from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth centuries conceived of an authoritative people that was also
corporate, although more abstract and general. For Pufendorf, the people
that brings a legitimate state into being is a ‘‘compound moral person’’ with a
single will, formed by a prior contract among individuals in a state of nature
(Pufendorf 1717 ). Corporate accounts have the advantage of presenting ‘‘the
people’’ as a body that can take eVective action. Their disadvantage (from the
point of view of what became the liberal tradition and the dominant political
discourse) is that the people as distinct individuals disappear into ‘‘the
people’’ as a body, an entity that has to be conceived as speaking and acting
only through oYcial spokesmen. Hard though it may be to square the circle,
our political discourse demands an account of the ultimate political authority
that somehow preserves both that corporate ability to take action and our
separate, plural identities as individual people.
Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty tried to unite individual and
collective aspects of the people and to make the abstract sovereign people
present in politics. Reconciliation was to be achieved by means of a General
Will directed to the common good, willed by the people both as individuals
and as a body assembled. Lacking faith in people as they were, however, he
undermined his own theory by conjuring up a lawgiver, enlightened enough
to discern the General Will and charismatic enough to form individual
citizens into a cohesive people that can be counted on to will it.
Locke’s very diVerent attempt to reconcile individual and collective people
has its own problems. Not content with conceiving of the people as a single
body able to hold the king to account, Locke simultaneously presents that
sovereign people as concrete individuals in full possession of their natural
rights. He tells us that men in a state of nature ‘‘enter into Society to make one
People, one Body Politick’’ (Locke 1964 , 343 ), after which power is entrusted
to a monarch but sovereignty stays with the people. This ‘‘people’’ that can act
to reclaim authority from king and parliament is not a constituted body of
the legally corporate kind; Locke says, indeed, that when government has
broken its trust, ‘‘everyone is at the disposure of his own will’’ (Locke 1964 ,
426 ). Nevertheless he clearly expects that the individuals concerned will be
able to actasa body in circumstances where formal ties between them no
longer exist. Richard Ashcraft has argued that what he had in mind was a
revolutionary ‘‘movement’’ (Ashcraft 1986 , 310 ).
It may be that the authoritative ‘‘people’’ that haunts our political discourse
is indeed best thought of neither as a formally organized corporate body nor as
356 margaret canovan